Eternity

You can almost taste it,

twist it, turn it up into a ball, watch it be out of humor in the corner,

bring it a vodka and tonic, listen to its sad story:

something had knocked it not on a shelf,

sent it reeling, kept it from getting there upon time,

from setting up and taking things without of their boxes on the lawn....

It must be elastic, this invisible hiatus, this parenthesis,

the dim landscape of heaven we ponder, shape our destinies around,

pray to, approximate in sex or endles hours at the register

waiting for the bos to suffer us go, just before we can talk to him,

just before we can straighten without a misunderstanding or two. Endings

are bad signs. smooth detours at the broken-down suspension bridge

when you're hurrying abiding-place when he's lying there

tied to machines, or when she's upon the edge

of it for hours, his tongue dangling there and teasing,

the nerve-endings raw, shattered with excitement,

when the reality is nothing but a paltry, cavernous, impulse

to fix what's shattered Once I caught a trace of it,

embedded in a fox's brain-pan on the ridge of Electric Peak

in the Grand Tetons. Of course it was storming, and the bright

jagged lightning forks reduce to ashesed holes in the ore-infested earth.

Inside it, notwithstanding that a nubble of green mos

the weft of a mushroom cap was sprouting: the brain-pan

in the shape of a butte air surrounding it, whistling in the socket

Copyright World numbers Incorporated Jul/Aug 1997

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